BLIND FEEL AND HEAR MAGNIFICENT SHOW -- EVEN SILENCE JUST AT LIFTOFF

Mark Tietig thought he would hear "a lot of rock 'n' roll and rumble" when the space shuttle Discovery blasted off Friday, but what he got instead was unexpected silence.

"A few moments before the liftoff I was struck by the loud and fast talking of the excited people around me," said Tietig, one of 30 members of the Brevard Council of the Blind at the VIP viewing site at Kennedy Space Center. "But at about T minus 2 the crowd really quieted down and by the exact moment of blastoff I was surprised that there was absolutely no sound at all."

Tietig, 30, said he knew Discovery was soaring toward space when he heard the crowd's cheers, which were followed at once by the resounding rumble of rocket engines. To Tietig, blinded six years ago in a boating accident, the engines sounded "like a string of firecrackers, but at a lower frequency."

Council president George Danchuk, 73, raised his hands over his head and hooted after the shuttle left the launch pad. His face radiated the flames his eyes could not see.

"It was like every Fourth of July I've ever been to all put together in one," Danchuk said. "I wish I could have seen this, but you never felt anything like it before in your life. You listen to the other people and soon you feel it too."

Council member Jane Hutchinson, 27, who has impaired sight but is not blind, used the extra time to take photographs.

"I compose a picture and then I get other people to focus the camera for me," the resident of Merritt Island said. "If any of these shots turn out, I'm going to have to resort to hanging them on the ceiling because the walls of my room are already full."

During the launch delay of nearly at because of bad weather, Tietig came up with his own conclusion about why the liftoff was behind schedule. "With Sen. Garn aboard, it's not T minus 9 and holding, it's T minus 9 and filibustering," the Merritt Island man joked.

Although the launch was a first for Tietig, he said it was not his first contact with NASA.

"Just after I was blinded I kept getting carsick because I'd lost my sense of the horizon," he said. "I decided to volunteer to do motion- sickness tests in space for NASA, but all I got from them was a form letter saying they'd put my application on file. That's the last I'd heard from them until today."

Danchuk, who organized the trip, said the goal of the council formed three years ago is to make the public aware that "the blind are people too."

"Most people expect blind folks to be inactive, but there's so much more to life than that," the Palm Bay man said.